I think you have to take the movie’s origins into account when you’re judging its worth. Nobody bought a ticket to see Robot Monster in the expectation that it would be a great movie. It was a throwaway drive-in movie with a four-figure budget. You can’t call a movie like that a failure because its aim was so low. It met its success level just by getting made.
A movie like the Psycho remake is different. Van Sant had just directed Good Will Hunting. He had a reputation from other films. This was a remake of a respected film. It was made by a mainstream studio. It had a budget and a professional cast and crew. This was a movie that created expectations. And then failed to meet them.
No, not a worthwhile list. If you’re going to have any fun with bad films, you have to do a lot more than list their titles.
I would myself, much prefer a list of “Very Bad Films That We Hoped Would Be Great.”
That would leave out a lot of the Plan 9 kind of stuff, and would leave out all the idiotic “vehicle” films cranked out to try to let some Hot Person Of The Moment to pretend they were also a movie star (i.e. anything starring Paris Hilton or Justin Bieber types).
I WANTED The Wild Wild West to be a good film, because I loved that TV show growing up. But when they announced that they’d signed Wil Smith for the lead, I knew it would be a problem, not because I didn’t like Smith (I very much do), but because it was obvious that the ONLY reason they made him the lead, was because he was the Hot Name of that year. That meant in turn, that every OTHER decision they made about the film was going to be for the wrong reasons, and that was born out by the mess they released.
When we walked out of the theater after seeing that movie, we were talking to perfect strangers and everyone had this puzzled look on their face and was saying or thinking: What the HELL was THAT!!!
